Engineers are given a great deal of freedom to build software in the ways that they feel are best. The environment is very open and collaborative within engineers on the same team.

Cons

Whitepages has a culture that embraces blame. Much of the company lives in fear of being blamed by C-level executives for unmet expectations and therefor has no appetite for risk. Product and middle management are constantly fighting and throwing eachother under the bus so as to deflect that incoming blame. There is no trust at Whitepages by management at the C-level and therefor all kinds of micro-management tactics have been put in place. There is also a cultural divide among the engineering teams that isn't being addressed. This ranges from technology/language choices to how they interface with eachother. The people in a position to address this are ignoring this part of their job. Teams regularly talk bad about the other teams behind their back. Finally, the things that engineers are building are neither new nor innovative. In fact the things Whitepages engineers are building are just rewrites of things the company has rewritten at least 3-4 times and the same mistakes are being made. There's a lot of "re-arranging deck chairs" feeling going on.

Advice to Management

Stop punishing failure and instead embrace the learnings gained by failure. Start trusting the engineers you've hired to do their job. End the culture of blame and integrate the departments more tightly.